Smarter checkouts, stronger connections. Sell and retain more in 2025.

In ecommerce, your checkout isn’t just the start of the finish line, it’s one of the most powerful relationship-building moments in the customer journeys you deliver.

With Shopify’s 2025 Checkout Extensibility updates, merchants now have more flexibility, control, and insight than ever before. The new features and capabilities transform what used to be a simple transaction into a smart, loyalty-driving interaction that strengthens customer relationships and boosts long-term growth for ecommerce brands.

In this article we’ll break down what’s new, what’s changed, and how ecommerce merchants can use these tools to make their sales journeys smarter, streamline workflows, and keep customers coming back.

From Transactions to Relationships

Since 2022 / 20203, Checkout Extensibility has been one of Shopify’s biggest investments. Designed to replace the legacy checkout.liquid setup, it gives merchants and developers a safer, faster, and more customisable way to extend and improve the checkout experience using Shopify’s Checkout UI extensions, Functions, and Pixels.

The 2025 release continues that evolution, making checkout not just a step in the sales process, but a moment of engagement with your customers that can add more value than ever.

Where merchants used to see checkout as the end of the funnel, Shopify now positions it as a gateway to optimised loyalty, trust, and retention.

Key New Features and What They Mean for Merchants

1. Persistent Discounts on Draft Orders

Here’s what’s new:

Merchants and in-store staff can now create discounted draft orders that retain the exact pricing when customers return to complete their purchase later, either online or in-store.

Why it matters:

This feature is a big win for customer trust. Before, if staff manually applied discounts or created quotes, those prices sometimes didn’t carry through to the final checkout. That meant confusion, awkward conversations, and even lost sales.

Now, quotes are accurate and reliable. Customers get the exact pricing they were promised, and merchants maintain full control of how and when discounts are applied.

The benefits:

  • Builds pricing confidence and credibility.
  • Reduces abandoned sales due to miscommunication.
  • Helps businesses that operate in both retail and ecommerce environments (like B2B sellers, custom orders, or made-to-order brands).

For merchants, it’s a smoother sales process, and for customers, it feels like dealing with a brand that truly keeps its word.

2. Store Credit: Turning Refunds into Repeat Sales

What’s new:

Instead of giving cash refunds, Shopify merchants can now issue store credit directly within Shopify POS and Online Checkout.

Why it matters:

Every refund traditionally represents lost revenue. But not anymore. When you issue store credit, that money stays in your ecosystem. The customer gets flexibility to buy again later, and you maintain the opportunity for another sale.

The benefits:

  • Retains revenue that would otherwise leave the business.
  • Increases lifetime customer value (LTV).
  • Keeps refunds simple, traceable, and easy to redeem.

Shopify automatically links store credit to a customer’s profile, ensuring clear visibility for staff and customers alike. Whether shoppers return online or in-store, their credit is there and ready to use when the time is right for them.

At a time when acquisition costs are going up and up, keeping customers in your orbit is high-value, and store credit makes that easier than ever.

3. SMS Opt-In at Checkout

What’s new:

Shoppers can now opt-in to SMS marketing at the point of purchase, via Shopify POS or the online checkout.

Why it matters:

SMS marketing remains one of the highest-engagement channels in ecommerce, with open rates often above 90%. The challenge has always been building the subscriber list in a compliant, non-disruptive way.

With this update, the opt-in becomes a natural, seamless part of the checkout flow. Whether a staff member triggers it on POS or a customer taps a checkbox online, it’s quick, intuitive, and entirely permission-based.

The benefits:

  • Builds your SMS marketing list effortlessly.
  • Creates a direct channel to your most engaged customers.
  • Increases repeat purchases through personalized post-purchase communication.

This creates the perfect blend of compliance and convenience, helping merchants grow their audience while keeping the checkout experience friction-free.

4. The Bigger Picture: Checkout Extensibility + POS

While these headline features are powerful on their own, the real transformation lies in how Shopify Checkout and Shopify POS now work together.

The integration between online and in-person channels is tighter than ever. Discounts, store credit, and customer data all sync in real time, creating a unified view of your customer  in-store, online, and both.

This is unified commerce in action: one platform, one profile, one customer experience.

For merchants, that means:

  • Less manual reconciliation between systems.
  • More accurate reporting.
  • Consistent brand experiences, wherever sales happen.

And for customers, it means convenience — because their loyalty, preferences, and purchases now follow them seamlessly between touchpoints.

5. Building for the Future

All these features are powered by Shopify’s modern checkout architecture, which replaces old scripts with modular, API-based extensions.

This matters because it gives merchants:

  • Faster checkout performance (better conversion rates).
  • Stronger security and reliability.
  • Easier maintenance, with automatic updates and reduced breakage risk.

In practical terms, you’re future-proofing your store. Whether it’s introducing new payment methods, loyalty integrations, or post-purchase upsells, Checkout Extensibility makes it easier to add features without disrupting your store.

For developers and technical partners like Cogsflow, it opens the door to more tailored, scalable, and stable custom solutions.

What This Means for Merchants in 2025

Shopify’s 2025 Checkout Extensibility updates are about making every sale more meaningful.

Here’s what ecommerce founders and retail operators can take away:

✅ More control and confidence - You control key factors from pricing to promotions.

✅ Fewer lost sales - Smoother experiences reduce cart abandonment.

✅ Increased customer loyalty - Store credit and SMS engagement keep buyers coming back.

✅ Unified operations - Online and offline channels finally speak the same language.

✅ Future-ready flexibility - Extensibility means your checkout evolves with your business.

Whether you’re selling fashion, homewares, beauty, or coffee, your checkout is now a strategic tool, as well as a highly functional one.

Final Thoughts from Cogsflow

At Cogsflow, we help ecommerce merchants bridge the gap between technology and growth with our own funding model, developed specifically for ecommerce founders. 

So, we support everything in technology that helps merchants expand, evolve and achieve their business objectives. The 2025 Checkout Extensibility updates are a perfect example of how smarter infrastructure can create better outcomes, for the merchants and their customers.

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